Back to the big screen

“I missed being on the screen,” says Michelle Pfeiffer, nibbling on a pistachio. “I just didn’t realize how much.” For five years – ever since “White Oleander” in 2002 – Pfeiffer didn’t appear in a movie. She didn’t officially retire; she still looked at scripts and, in 2003, contributed a voice to a cartoon, “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.” But she never went before a camera or stepped on a stage.

“It just sort of happened,” explains Pfeiffer, who is married to TV mogul David E. Kelley, with whom she has two teenagers.

“We moved, and that was a job. And I have a lot of other interests, and the time just flew by.”

Until suddenly it was five years.

“I began to think, ‘This isn’t like me, not to need to go back to work, I’m a worker, I’ve always been a worker, I love what I do. Maybe I don’t love this anymore. I should be missing this – what’s wrong with me?’ “

And then she got the script for “Stardust,” a romantic fantasy that opened Friday.

And then she got the script for “Hairspray,” currently a sunny summer hit.

And suddenly just staying home, and working out, and snuggling up with Kelley on the couch to watch television didn’t seem like quite enough.

“And once I stepped back on the soundstage,” she says, “it felt right.”

Right, but also different.

For years, Pfeiffer, 49, had put her talent and looks in the service of serious dramas: “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Love Field,” “The Age of Innocence,” “A Thousand Acres,” “The Deep End of the Ocean.” Her characters were often frustrated, her enormous eyes frequently red-rimmed with tears.

But her latest films tap into a sexy, silly side of her little seen since she last slithered through “Batman Returns” in a vacuum-packed catsuit, or wailed her way through “Grease 2.”

In “Hairspray,” she’s a monster mother; in “Stardust,” she’s a scheming, looks-obsessed witch.

“I had so much fun,” Pfeiffer says. ” ‘Stardust’ really got me charged up, just from an acting point of view – I got all cylinders going again.”

“I think she was really reveling in her role as an evil witch,” says Claire Danes, who plays the movie’s spunky heroine. “It was a great display of imagination. I think she’s just an electric performer anyway, but she really pushed herself.”

Growing up, Pfeiffer lived an unremarkable Southern California life – going to the beach, rolling her eyes through high school, ringing up avocadoes at the local supermarket. Nothing made much of an impression.

And then she discovered acting.

“I first enrolled in a drama class because I hated English, and I could get the English credit by doing plays,” she says. “And not only did I fall in love with acting, but I fell in love with an actor who I dated for two years – and that was when the bug first bit me. And when I got out of school I decided to just do it.”

With straight blond hair, bright blue eyes and cheekbones you could whet a knife on, Pfeiffer didn’t spend much time struggling. Barely 20, she landed a recurring part on TV’s “Animal House” knockoff, “Delta House,” playing “The Bombshell.”

Decorative parts in shows like “Fantasy Island” and movies like “Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen” soon followed.

Within two years, she’d notched a dozen credits. But if her agent was thrilled, Pfeiffer was terrified she was in over her head.

“I was so nervous and scared, because I knew that I was getting work before my skills were where I wanted them to be,” she says. “The confidence was incremental. … There was never really any one film where I thought, ‘OK, I’ve finally gotten this down.’ I still don’t.”

“Scarface,” in 1983, established her as a screen presence, but it also froze her into a pose – the icy, almost-too-perfect love object.

It took Jonathan Demme’s “Married to the Mob” five years later – with Pfeiffer hidden under a mop of dark curls as struggling widow Angie de Marco – to prove that she wasn’t a beauty who happened to act, but an actress who happened to be a beauty.

“I’m still so indebted to Jonathan for believing I could do that movie,” she says. “That role was a huge departure for me, and it shook people up and made it difficult for them to typecast me.

“I never wanted to just do the parts that were expected of me. I never wanted to just be the pretty girl in the room.”

She went on to play an untrustworthy French noblewoman in “Dangerous Liaisons,” a smoky jazz chanteuse in “The Fabulous Baker Boys,” a Kennedy-era matron in “Love Field,” a bottled-up lady in “The Age of Innocence” and a tough ghetto teacher in “Dangerous Minds.”

In “Stardust,” Pfeiffer is a crone who can only recover her youth by consuming the heart of a star that fell to earth, personified by Danes.

These days, she says, “Things seem to be more youth-obsessed, as opposed to beauty. Which is one of the things I liked about ‘Stardust,’ that it poked fun at that.”

Now Pfeiffer is reading scripts again. “It won’t be another five years before I do a movie, I promise,” she says.

But since she has taken the time off, she’s realized that the world doesn’t end when she’s not on the set. And she knows that however well or poorly the movie turns out, she always has another role waiting for her at home – and another opportunity, somewhere down the road, in a another film.

“I always had the feeling that I really don’t know what I’m doing and that one day they’re going to discover what a fraud I am,” she says. “And that’s never really left me. I still think I’m going to be found out.

“But it’s just that, lately, I’ve learned how to have fun with it. I’ve found a balance. And if they find me out now – well, so what?”